De kogel is door de kerk. After years of focussing entirely on Gtk+ and GNOME, Ubuntu will finally start evaluating Qt applications for inclusion in the defaukt Ubuntu installation. Mark Shuttleworth announced the policy change on his blog today.

dconf has technical advantages over flat-file storage, including notice of changes, and a quite fast retrieval/loading mechanism (as it is more likely that settings are read than written).

Having the author of dconf write bindings for Qt, so there is the choice of using it, is a good thing!

But only Qt applications which were re-written to explicitly call those bindings (probably making them a dependency, and also therefore bringing in dconf as a dependency) would be able to work.

However, modifying dconf to also provide a replacement QSettings class and a replacement qtconfig would provide the desired mechanisms for Qt applications running under Ubuntu's GNOME to use the dconf database WITHOUT having to modify said Qt applications!

But only Qt applications which were re-written to explicitly call those bindings (probably making them a dependency, and also therefore bringing in dconf as a dependency) would be able to work.

However, modifying dconf to also provide a replacement QSettings class and a replacement qtconfig would provide the desired mechanisms for Qt applications running under Ubuntu's GNOME to use the dconf database WITHOUT having to modify said Qt applications!

Better for everybody!

This would be a bad software design. dconf has a very dedicated purpose, you do not want to complicate it with unnecessary functionality.